Typically, team members working on one or more projects within a company collaborate together in a micro-meeting or huddle on a regular basis. These huddles allow for collaboration in the sharing of information, discussion of important topics, evaluating project performance, identifying issues, and/or solving problems. Since the introduction of the huddle concept, whiteboards have acted as the traditional tool for storing information collected during an active huddle session. However, a drawback of this huddle methodology is that it may not be possible for all participants in a meeting to be in the same physical location at the same time.
Alternatives to overcome the challenge of gathering team members who may be at different locations for a huddle include the use of a collaboration system integrating one or more collaboration tools, such as conference phone calls, video conferences, Internet relay chat (IRC), emails, and instant messaging, among others. These automated collaboration systems are useful for promoting the information-sharing process between participants, increasing the productivity of the participants by providing means to organize ideas, time, work and efforts, and helping participants to keep track of the project's goals. However, whenever a participant changes his/her role within the organization, manual updates of the groups of participants in a huddle are required, which can be time-consuming and can be prone to human error and oversight.
Therefore, there is a need for systems and methods to automatically manage a group of participants in a huddle to overcome these and other drawbacks of traditional approaches.